Rakudo Star Release 2016.11

2016-11-27

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm pleased to
announce the November 2016 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable
production distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the November 2016 release
is available from http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/.

This is the fifth post-Christmas (production) release of Rakudo Star and
implements Perl v6.c. It comes with support for the MoarVM backend (all
module tests pass on supported platforms).

Please note that this release of Rakudo Star is not fully functional with
the JVM backend from the Rakudo compiler. Please use the MoarVM backend
only.

In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language ("Perl
6") and specific implementations of the language such as "Rakudo Perl".
This Star release includes release 2016.11 of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler,
version 2016.11 of MoarVM, plus various modules, documentation, and
other resources collected from the Perl 6 community.

+ DBIish: Prepare tests for lexical module loading and do not rely on your dependencies to load modules
+ Pod-To-HTML: Bump version and use a separate element as anchor for "to top" links
+ Terminal-ANSIColor: Update Pod documentation and support 256-color and 24-bit RGB modes
+ doc: Large number of changes - too many to detail here
+ json_fast: Speed gains
+ panda: Explicitly use Panda::Project as we use it in class Panda
+ perl6-lwp-simple: Change to http.perl6.org since the main site is going https and add NO_NETWORK_TESTING

There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not yet
handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming releases.
Some of the not-quite-there features include:

advanced macros

non-blocking I/O (in progress)

some bits of Synopsis 9 and 11

There is an online resource at http://perl6.org/compilers/features
that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo's
backends and other Perl 6 implementations.

In many places we've tried to make Rakudo smart enough to inform the
programmer that a given feature isn't implemented, but there are many
that we've missed. Bug reports about missing and broken features are
welcomed at rakudobug@perl.org.

See http://perl6.org/ for links to much more information about
Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, presentations,
reference materials, design documents, and other supporting resources.
Some Perl 6 tutorials are available under the "docs" directory in
the release tarball.

The development team thanks all of the contributors and sponsors for
making Rakudo Star possible. If you would like to contribute, see
http://rakudo.org/how-to-help, ask on the perl6-compiler@perl.org
mailing list, or join us on IRC #perl6 on freenode.